Saturday, September 08, 2012

From The Pens Of Karl Marx And Friedrich Engels-Their Struggles To Build Communist Organizations-The Early Days- Frederick Engels 1847-The Principles of Communism



Click on the headline to link to the Marx-Engels Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.

Markin comment:

The foundation article by Marx or Engels listed in the headline goes along with the propaganda points in the fight for our communist future mentioned in other posts in this space. Just below is a thumbnail sketch of the first tentative proceedings to form a communist organization that would become a way-station on the road to building a Bolshevik-type organization in order fight for the socialist revolution we so desperately need and have since Marx and Engels first put pen to ink.
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Marx/Engels Internet Archive-The Communist League

A congress of the League of the Just opened in London on June 2, 1847. Engels was in attendance as delegate for the League's Paris communities. (Marx couldn't attend for financial reasons.)

Engels had a significant impact throughout the congress -- which, as it turned out, was really the "inaugural Congress" of what became known as the Communist League. This organization stands as the first international proletarian organization. With the influence of Marx and Engels anti-utopian socialism, the League's motto changed from "All Men are Brothers" to "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"

Engels: "In the summer of 1847, the first league congress took place in London, at which W. Wolff represented the Brussels and I the Paris communities. At this congress the reorganization of the League was carried through first of all. ...the League now consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress, and henceforth called itself the 'Communist League'."

The Rules were drawn up with the participation of Marx and Engels, examined at the First Congress of the Communist League, and approved at the League's Second Congress in December 1847.

Article 1 of the Rules of the Communist League: "The aim of the league is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society which rests on the antagonism of classes, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without private property."

The first draft of the Communist League Programme was styled as a catechism -- in the form of questions and answers. Essentially, the draft was authored by Engels. The original manuscript is in Engels's hand.

The League's official paper was to be the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, but the only issue produced was in September 1847 by a resolution of the League's First Congress. It was First Congress prepared by the Central Authority of the Communist League based in London. Karl Schapper was its editor.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held at the end of November 1847 at London's Red Lion Hotel. Marx attended as delegate of the Brussels Circle. He went to London in the company of Victor Tedesco, member of the Communist League and also a delegate to the Second Congress. Engels again represented the Paris communities. Schapper was elected chairman of the congress, and Engels its secretary.

Friedrich Lessner: "I was working in London then and was a member of the communist Workers' Educational Society at 191 Drury Lane. There, at the end of November and the beginning of December 1847, members of the Central Committee of the Communist League held a congress. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels came there from Brussels to present their views on modern communism and to speak about the Communists' attitude to the political and workers' movement. The meetings, which, naturally, were held in the evenings, were attended by delegates only... Soon we learned that after long debates, the congress had unanimously backed the principles of Marx and Engels..."

The Rules were officially adopted December 8, 1847.

Engels: "All contradiction and doubt were finally set at rest, the new basic principles were unanimously adopted, and Marx and I were commissioned to draw up the Manifesto." This would, of course, become the Communist Manifesto.
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Markin comment on this series:

No question that today at least the figures of 19th century communist revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, are honored more for their “academic” work than their efforts to build political organizations to fight for democratic and socialist revolutions, respectively, as part of their new worldview. Titles like Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, The Peasants Wars In Germany, and the like are more likely to be linked to their names than Cologne Communist League or Workingmen’s International (First International). While the theoretical and historical materialist works have their honored place in the pantheon of revolutionary literature it would be wrong to neglect that hard fact that both Marx and Engels for most of their lives were not “arm chair" revolutionaries or, in Engels case, smitten by fox hunts. These men were revolutionary politicians who worked at revolution in high times and low. Those of us who follow their traditions can, or should, understand that sometimes, a frustratingly long sometimes, the objective circumstances do not allow for fruitful revolutionary work. We push on as we can. Part of that pushing on is to become immersed in the work of our predecessors and in this series the work of Marx and Engels to create a new form of revolutionary organization to fight the fights of their time, the time from about the Revolutions of 1848 to the founding of various socialist parties in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century.
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Frederick Engels 1847-The Principles of Communism

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Written: October-November 1847;
Source: Selected Works, Volume One, p. 81-97, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969;
First Published: 1914, Eduard Bernstein in the German Social Democratic Party’s Vorwärts!;
Translated: Paul Sweezy;
Transcribed: Zodiac, MEA 1993; marxists.org 1999;
HTML Markup: Brian Baggins;
Proofed: and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005.

Document Introduction.


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— 1 —
What is Communism?
Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.




— 2 —
What is the proletariat?
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.[1]




— 3 —
Proletarians, then, have not always existed?
No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions.




— 4 —
How did the proletariat originate?
The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world.

This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry.

Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metal industries.

Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done.

But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor.

This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of labor are performed in factories – and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. These are:

(i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistance and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie.

(ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.




— 5 —
Under what conditions does this sale of the
labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place?
Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor.

But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum.

This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production.




— 6 —
What working classes were there before the industrial revolution?
The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.

In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States.

In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists.




— 7 —
In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?
The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.




— 8 —
In what way do proletarians differ from serfs?
The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor.

The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product.

The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it.

The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.




— 9 —
In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen?
In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement. [2]




— 10 —
In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers?
The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, an instrument of production in his own possession – his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things.

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation.

The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.




— 11 —
What were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution and of the division of society into bourgeoisie and proletariat?
First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totally destroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based upon hand labor.

In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violently forced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of years – for example, India – were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way to a revolution.

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year’s time.

In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries.

It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class.

Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy.

The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.

The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society.

Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way.

Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.

Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital.

Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength.

Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution.




— 12 —
What were the further consequences of the industrial revolution?
Big industry created in the steam engine, and other machines, the means of endlessly expanding industrial production, speeding it up, and cutting its costs. With production thus facilitated, the free competition, which is necessarily bound up with big industry, assumed the most extreme forms; a multitude of capitalists invaded industry, and, in a short while, more was produced than was needed.

As a consequence, finished commodities could not be sold, and a so-called commercial crisis broke out. Factories had to be closed, their owners went bankrupt, and the workers were without bread. Deepest misery reigned everywhere.

After a time, the superfluous products were sold, the factories began to operate again, wages rose, and gradually business got better than ever.

But it was not long before too many commodities were again produced and a new crisis broke out, only to follow the same course as its predecessor.

Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.




— 13 —
What follows from these periodic commercial crises?
First:

That, though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition;

that, for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter;

that, so long as big industry remains on its present footing, it can be maintained only at the cost of general chaos every seven years, each time threatening the whole of civilization and not only plunging the proletarians into misery but also ruining large sections of the bourgeoisie;

hence, either that big industry must itself be given up, which is an absolute impossibility, or that it makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

Second: That big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom.

It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.

We see with the greatest clarity:

(i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and

(ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.




— 14 —
What will this new social order have to be like?
Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.

It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.

Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.

In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.




— 15 —
Was not the abolition of private property possible at an earlier time?
No. Every change in the social order, every revolution in property relations, is the necessary consequence of the creation of new forces of production which no longer fit into the old property relations.

Private property has not always existed.

When, towards the end of the Middle Ages, there arose a new mode of production which could not be carried on under the then existing feudal and guild forms of property, this manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form, private property. And for manufacture and the earliest stage of development of big industry, private property was the only possible property form; the social order based on it was the only possible social order.

So long as it is not possible to produce so much that there is enough for all, with more left over for expanding the social capital and extending the forces of production – so long as this is not possible, there must always be a ruling class directing the use of society’s productive forces, and a poor, oppressed class. How these classes are constituted depends on the stage of development.

The agrarian Middle Ages give us the baron and the serf; the cities of the later Middle Ages show us the guildmaster and the journeyman and the day laborer; the 17th century has its manufacturing workers; the 19th has big factory owners and proletarians.

It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point where enough could be developed for all, and that private property has become a fetter and a barrier in relation to the further development of the forces of production.

Now, however, the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand to multiply them without limit in the near future. Moreover, the forces of production have been concentrated in the hands of a few bourgeois, while the great mass of the people are more and more falling into the proletariat, their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of wealth of the bourgeoisie. And finally, these mighty and easily extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie, that they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible but absolutely necessary.




— 16 —
Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible?
It would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but even harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that, everywhere and always, they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes.

But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed, and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength. If the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds as we now defend them with words.




— 17 —
Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?
No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society.

In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.




— 18 —
What will be the course of this revolution?
Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people. Indirect in France and Germany, where the majority of the people consists not only of proletarians, but also of small peasants and petty bourgeois who are in the process of falling into the proletariat, who are more and more dependent in all their political interests on the proletariat, and who must, therefore, soon adapt to the demands of the proletariat. Perhaps this will cost a second struggle, but the outcome can only be the victory of the proletariat.

Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat. The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:

(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.

(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.

(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.

(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.

(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.

(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.

(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost. Education and production together.

(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.

(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.

(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.

(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.

It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.

Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.




— 19 —
Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?
No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others.

Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany.

It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. Hence, it will go slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England. It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace.

It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.




— 20 —
What will be the consequences of the
ultimate disappearance of private property?
Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.

There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone.

The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels. Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs.

In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members.

The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary. Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order. The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear. For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development.

Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material.

People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others; they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a whole. Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful.

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.

The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear. Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations. It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.

A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear. The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association. The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development.

The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.




— 21 —
What will be the influence of communist society on the family?
It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the “community of women”. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.




— 22 —
What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?
The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.[3]




— 23 —
What will be its attitude to existing religions?
All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is the stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance[4]




— 24 —
How do communists differ from socialists?
The so-called socialists are divided into three categories.



[ Reactionary Socialists: ]
The first category consists of adherents of a feudal and patriarchal society which has already been destroyed, and is still daily being destroyed, by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes, from the evils of existing society, that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end.

This category of reactionary socialists, for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat, is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons:

(i) It strives for something which is entirely impossible.

(ii) It seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guildmasters, the small producers, and their retinue of absolute or feudal monarchs, officials, soldiers, and priests – a society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers the prospect of liberation through a communist revolution.

(iii) As soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians.



[ Bourgeois Socialists: ]
The second category consists of adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise. What they want, therefore, is to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it.

To this end, some propose mere welfare measures – while others come forward with grandiose systems of reform which, under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society.

Communists must unremittingly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and protect the society which communists aim to overthrow.



[ Democratic Socialists: ]
Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures the communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society.

These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat.

It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them – provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists.

It is clear that this form of co-operation in action does not exclude the discussion of differences.




— 25 —
What is the attitude of the communists to the
other political parties of our time?
This attitude is different in the different countries.

In England, France, and Belgium, where the bourgeoisie rules, the communists still have a common interest with the various democratic parties, an interest which is all the greater the more closely the socialistic measures they champion approach the aims of the communists – that is, the more clearly and definitely they represent the interests of the proletariat and the more they depend on the proletariat for support. In England, for example, the working-class Chartists are infinitely closer to the communists than the democratic petty bourgeoisie or the so-called Radicals.

In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat – that is, with the agrarian National Reformers.

In Switzerland, the Radicals, though a very mixed party, are the only group with which the communists can co-operate, and, among these Radicals, the Vaudois and Genevese are the most advanced.

In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist

(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and

(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power.



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Footnotes
The following footnotes are from the Chinese Edition of
Marx/Engels Selected Works
Peking, Foreign Languages Press, 1977.
with editorial additions by marxists.org




Introduction In 1847 Engels wrote two draft programmes for the Communist League in the form of a catechism, one in June and the other in October. The latter, which is known as Principles of Communism, was first published in 1914. The earlier document Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith, was only found in 1968. It was first published in 1969 in Hamburg, together with four other documents pertaining to the first congress of the Communist League, in a booklet entitled Gründungs Dokumente des Bundes der Kommunisten (Juni bis September 1847) (Founding Documents of the Communist League).

At the June 1847 Congress of the League of the Just, which was also the founding conference of the Communist League, it was decided to issue a draft “confession of faith” to be submitted for discussion to the sections of the League. The document which has now come to light is almost certainly this draft. Comparison of the two documents shows that Principles of Communism is a revised edition of this earlier draft. In Principles of Communism, Engels left three questions unanswered, in two cases with the notation “unchanged” (bleibt); this clearly refers to the answers provided in the earlier draft.

The new draft for the programme was worked out by Engels on the instructions of the leading body of the Paris circle of the Communist League. The instructions were decided on after Engles’ sharp criticism at the committee meeting, on October 22, 1847, of the draft programme drawn up by the “true socialist” Moses Hess, which was then rejected.

Still considering Principles of Communism as a preliminary draft, Engels expressed the view, in a letter to Marx dated November 23-24 1847, that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form and draw up a programme in the form of a manifesto.

“Think over the Confession of Faith a bit. I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto. As more or less history has got to be related in it, the form it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable. I am bringing what I have done here with me; it is in simple narrative form, but miserably worded, in fearful haste. ...”

At the second congress of the Communist League (November 29-December 8, 1847) Marx and Engels defended the fundamental scientific principles of communism and were trusted with drafting a programme in the form of a manifesto of the Communist Party. In writing the manifesto the founders of Marxism made use of the propositions enunciated in Principles of Communism.

Engels uses the term Manufaktur, and its derivatives, which have been translated “manufacture”, “manufacturing”, etc., Engels used this word literally, to indicate production by hand, not factory production for which Engels uses “big industry”. Manufaktur differs from handicraft (guild production in mediaeval towns), in that the latter was carried out by independent artisans. Manufacktur is carried out by homeworkers working for merchant capitalists, or by groups of craftspeople working together in large workshops owned by capitalists. It is therefore a transitional mode of production, between guild (handicraft) and modern (capitalist) forms of production.

(Last paragraph paraphrased from the
Introduction by Pluto Press, London, 1971)

1. In their works written in later periods, Marx and Engels substituted the more accurate concepts of “sale of labour power”, “value of labour power” and “price of labour power” (first introduced by Marx) for “sale of labour”, “value of labour” and “price of labour”, as used here.

2. Engels left half a page blank here in the manuscript. The Draft of the Communist Confession of Faith, has the answer shown for the same question (Number 12).

3. Engels’ put “unchanged” here, referring to the answer in the June draft under No. 21 which is shown.

4. Similarly, this refers to the answer to Question 23 in the June draft.

5. The Chartists were the participants in the political movement of the British workers which lasted from the 1830s to the middle 1850s and had as its slogan the adoption of a People’s Charter, demanding universal franchise and a series of conditions guaranteeing voting rights for all workers. Lenin defined Chartism as the world’s “first broad, truly mass and politically organized proletarian revolutionary movement” (Collected Works, Eng. ed., Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Vol. 29, p. 309.) The decline of the Chartist movement was due to the strengthening of Britain’s industrial and commercial monopoly and the bribing of the upper stratum of the working class (“the labour aristocracy”) by the British bourgeoisie out of its super-profits. Both factors led to the strengthening of opportunist tendencies in this stratum as expressed, in particular, by the refusal of the trade union leaders to support Chartism.

6. Probably a references to the National Reform Association, founded during the 1840s by George H. Evans, with headquarters in New York City, which had for its motto, “Vote Yourself a Farm”.

Friday, September 07, 2012

The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-Protest Against Massacre of South African Strikers


Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

Reposted from the American Left History blog, dated December 1, 2010.

Markin comment:

I like to think of myself as a fervent supporter of the Partisan Defense Committee, an organization committed to social and political defense cases and causes in the interests of the working class and, at this time of the year, to raising funds to support the class-war prisoners’ stipend program. Normally I do not need any prompting in the matter. This year, however, in light of the addition of Attorney Lynne Stewart (yes, I know, she has been disbarred but that does not make her less of a people’s attorney in my eyes) to the stipend program, I read the 25th Anniversary Appeal article in Workers Vanguard No. 969 where I was startled to note how many of the names, organizations, and political philosophies mentioned there hark back to my own radical coming of age, and the need for class-struggle defense of all our political prisoners in the late 1960s (although I may not have used that exact term at the time).

That recognition included names like black liberation fighter George Jackson, present class-war prisoner Hugo Pinell’s San Quentin Six comrade; the Black Panthers, as represented here by two of the Omaha Three (Poindexter and wa Langa), in their better days and in the days when we needed, desperately needed, to fight for their defense in places from Oakland to New Haven; the struggle, the fierce struggle, against the death penalty as represented in Mumia’s case today; the Ohio 7 and the Weather Underground who, rightly or wrongly, were committed to building a second front against American imperialism, and who most of the left, the respectable left, abandoned; and, of course, Leonard Peltier and the Native American struggles from Pine Ridge to the Southwest. It has been a long time and victories few. I could go on but you get the point.

That point also includes the hard fact that we have paid a high price, a very high price, for not winning back in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we last had this capitalist imperialist society on the ropes. Maybe it was political immaturity, maybe it was cranky theory, maybe it was elitism, hell, maybe it was just old-fashioned hubris but we let them off the hook. And have had to fight forty years of rear-guard “culture wars” since just to keep from falling further behind.

And the class-war prisoners, our class-war prisoners, have had to face their “justice” and their prisons. That lesson should be etched in the memory of every pro-working class militant today. And this, as well, as a quick glance at the news these days should make every liberation fighter realize; the difference between being on one side of that prison wall and the other is a very close thing when the bourgeoisie decides to pull the hammer down. The support of class-war prisoners is thus not charity, as International Labor Defense founder James P. Cannon noted back in the 1920s, but a duty of those fighters outside the walls. Today I do my duty, and gladly.
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Protest Against Massacre of South African Strikers

On August 30, some one hundred trade unionists, students and leftists protested outside the South African Consulate in New York in response to the August 16 massacre of 34 striking South African miners at the Lonmin Platinum-run Marikana mine northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. The Partisan Defense Committee (PDC) initiated this united-front protest with the demands:

Protest Massacre of South African Strikers!
Free Jailed Miners—Drop All Charges!
Victory to the Striking Miners!

Participants at the protest included Kevin Harrington from the Transport Workers Union Local 100, members of the New York chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Spartacist League supporters and anti-police brutality activist Matthew Swaye of Stop Stop & Frisk. Other endorsers of this demonstration included union officials from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in Britain, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21, International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422, Wisconsin’s South Central Federation of Labor and United Auto Workers Civil and Human Rights Chicago Chapter. Many of the trade unionists who endorsed this protest come from industries and unions that have been under attack here in the U.S.

The South African cops of the Tripartite Alliance government, made up of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the COSATU trade union federation, perpetrated this slaughter—one of the worst in South African history. Now the South African government is resurrecting an apartheid-era law to charge 270 miners with the murder of their own comrades. Drop all charges! Victory to the striking miners! For international workers solidarity with the South African miners!



THE OHIO SEVEN'S JAAN LAAMAN AND TOM MANNING STILL IN PRISON. IT IS AN URGENT DUTY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT AND OTHERS TO RAISE THE CALL FOR THEIR FREEDOM. FREE ALL CLASS WAR PRISONERS.




Click on the headline to link to the Partisan Defense Committee website.

Markin comment:

The Ohio Seven, like many other subjective revolutionaries, coming out of the turbulent anti-Vietnam War and anti-imperialist movements, were committed to social change. The different is that this organization included mainly working class militants some of whose political consciousness was formed by participation as soldiers in the Vietnam War itself. Various members were convicted for carrying out robberies, apparently to raise money for their struggles, and bombings of imperialist targets. Without going into their particular personal and political biographies I note that these were the kind of subjective revolutionaries that must be recruited to a working class vanguard party if there ever is to be a chance of bringing off a socialist revolution. In the absence of a viable revolutionary labor party in the 1970’s and 1980’s the politics of the Ohio Seven, like the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, were borne of despair at the immensity of the task and but also desperation to do something concrete in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and other Third World struggles . Their actions in trying to open up a second front militarily in the United States in aid of Third World struggles without a mass base proved to be mistaken but, as the Partisan Defense Committee which I support has noted, their actions were no crime in the eyes of the international working class.

The lack of a revolutionary vanguard to attract such working class elements away from adventurism is rendered even more tragic in the case of the Ohio Seven. Leon Trotsky, a leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917, noted in a political obituary for his fallen comrade and fellow Left Oppositionists Kote Tsintadze that the West has not produced such fighters as Kote. Kote, who went through all the phases of struggle for the Russian Revolution, including imprisonment and exile under both the Czar and Stalin benefited from solidarity in a mass revolutionary vanguard party to sustain him through the hard times. What a revolutionary party could have done with the evident capacity and continuing commitment of subjective revolutionaries like the Ohio Seven poses that question point blank. This is the central problem and task of cadre development in the West in resolving the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

Finally, I would like to note that except for the Partisan Defense Committee and their own defense organizations – the Ohio 7 Defense Committee and the Jaan Laaman Defense Fund- Ohio Seven have long ago been abandoned by those New Left elements and others, who as noted, at one time had very similar politics. At least part of this can be attributed to the rightward drift to liberal pacifist politics by many of them, but some must be attributed to class. Although the Ohio Seven were not our people- they are our people. All honor to them. As James P Cannon, a founding leader of the International Labor Defense, forerunner of the Partisan Defense Committee, pointed out long ago –Solidarity with class war prisoners is not charity- it is a duty. Their fight is our fight! LET US DO OUR DUTY HERE. RAISE THE CALL FOR THE FREEDOM OF LAAMAN AND MANNING. MAKE MOTIONS OF SOLIDARITY IN YOUR POLITICAL ORGANIZATION, SCHOOL OR UNION.


“Workers of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains”-The Struggle For Trotsky's Fourth (Communist) International -The Maturing Revolutionary Situation in Europe and-The Immediate Tasks of the IV International-Political Resolution Adopted by the European Executive Committee, Fourth International-January 1945


Markin comment:

Below this general introduction is another addition to the work of creating a new international working class organization-a revolutionary one fit of the the slogan in the headline.

Markin comment (repost from September 2010):

Recently, when the question of an international, a new workers international, a fifth international, was broached by the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), faintly echoing the call by Venezuelan caudillo, Hugo Chavez, I got to thinking a little bit more on the subject. Moreover, it must be something in the air (maybe caused by these global climatic changes) because I have also seen recent commentary on the need to go back to something that looks very much like Karl Marx’s one-size-fits-all First International. Of course, just what the doctor by all means, be my guest, but only if the shades of Proudhon and Bakunin can join. Boys and girls that First International was disbanded in the wake of the demise of the Paris Commune for a reason, okay. Mixing political banners (Marxism and fifty-seven varieties of anarchism) is appropriate to a united front, not a hell-bent revolutionary International fighting, and fighting hard, for our communist future. Forward

The Second International, for those six, no seven, people who might care, is still alive and well (at least for periodic international conferences) as a mail-drop for homeless social democrats who want to maintain a fig leaf of internationalism without having to do much about it. Needless to say, one Joseph Stalin and his cohorts liquidated the Communist (Third) International in 1943, long after it turned from a revolutionary headquarters into an outpost of Soviet foreign policy. By then no revolutionary missed its demise, nor shed a tear goodbye. And of course there are always a million commentaries by groups, cults, leagues, tendencies, etc. claiming to stand in the tradition (although, rarely, the program) of the Leon Trotsky-inspired Fourth International that, logically and programmatically, is the starting point of any discussion of the modern struggle for a new communist international.

With that caveat in mind this month, the September American Labor Day month, but more importantly the month in 1938 that the ill-fated Fourth International was founded I am posting some documents around the history of that formation, and its program, the program known by the shorthand, Transitional Program. If you want to call for a fifth, sixth, seventh, what have you, revolutionary international, and you are serious about it beyond the "mail-drop" potential, then you have to look seriously into that organization's origins, and the world-class Bolshevik revolutionary who inspired it. Forward.
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The Maturing Revolutionary Situation in Europe and-The Immediate Tasks of the IV International-Political Resolution Adopted by the European Executive Committee, Fourth International-January 1945

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Adopted: January 1945
First Published: June 1945
Source:Fourth International, New York, June 1945, Volume 6, No. 6 pages. 170-74.
Transcribed/HTML Markup: Daniel Gaido and David Walters, February, 2006
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskism On-Line, 2006. You can freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive as your source, include the address of this work, and note the transcribers & proofreaders above.

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The events which have transpired since the European Conference in February 1944 have on the whole confirmed the perspectives of the Conference.

In June 1944 American and British imperialism abandoned their expectant attitude and hurled en masse their armed forces on Europe with the aim of annihilating German imperialism and at the same time of damming up the revolutionary tide, smashing it, counteracting the influence of the USSR and thus definitely consolidating the multiple gains which the war has procured for them in Europe.

The reactionary, and clearly counter-revolutionary character of their intervention has everywhere been amply demonstrated.

Counter-Revolutionary Imperialist Intervention

In Italy—against the democratic and revolutionary aspirations of the Italian masses—they supported Badoglio, one of the principal pillars of Mussolini’s fascist regime and of the bankrupt monarchy. After Badoglio was compelled to resign in face of the growing discontent of the people, British and American imperialism thrust Bonomi to the forefront and continued to exercise their reactionary tutelage on him and on the whole of political life in Italy.

In Belgium they supported Pierlot, representative of big Belgian finance capital, and they did not hesitate to protect his artificial and despised regime with the firepower of their tanks and their cannons.

In Greece they openly undertook the defense of the reactionary bourgeoisie grouped around Papandreou and the fascist formations which martyrized the Greek people during the Hitlerite occupation. With exceptional brutality and savagery, they used their airplanes and their tanks and employed their fleet in a blockade in order to beat down the indomitable revolutionary energy of this small nation.

In Spain, while continuing to support the butcher Franco in power, their policy consists in cushioning the shock of his inevitable collapse and preparing the transition by means of a provisional government resting on the army and the police.

Finally, in Germany, to the extent that their armies have penetrated the country, their measures are pervaded by a constant care to avert—and to smash in the event it erupts—the revolutionary explosion of the German people, by imposing a regime of oppression and terror based in part on the fascist elements of the Hitlerite administrative apparatus and the SS formations. Although British imperialism, more directly interested in the European situation, better informed, more experienced traditionally and more cynical, appears as the most aggressive imperialist force, there is no real difference between it and American imperialism on the attitude to be adopted towards the revolutionary movements of the European masses. Despite the real and profound antagonisms between them and although they occasionally have different interests in various European countries, they are both in agreement on the necessity of maintaining reactionary capitalist order everywhere in Europe and of smashing the beginnings of the revolutionary upsurge of the masses.

The Policy of Stalinism

The Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR has definitely shown itself to be no less hostile to any revolutionary development in Europe. This was foreseen and has manifested itself in a more complex way because of the diversity of its interests in different European countries and because of the lesser or greater pressure of the masses on the apparatus of the Communist parties. In countries occupied by the Red Army—Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland—the capitalist regime is maintained; the military apparatus reigns as master and the reactionary generals and fascists (Mannerheim, Miklos, Radescu) who participated in the war against Russia, remain at the helm, supported by “People’s Front” combinations of bourgeois politicians and CP representatives. In all these countries, the Stalinist bureaucracy is concerned above all with appearing before world imperialism as a factor of “law and order.”

In France, with the objective of concluding a military alliance with this country for the purpose of jointly plundering Germany and in order to wrest France from the American orbit, the Communist Party is taking the lead in the policy of national unity and it is consciously sacrificing the vital interests of the working class.

In Italy, the Communist Party systematically aspires by its policy to win the confidence of the bourgeoisie and to gain agreement with the Vatican, in order there also to become a great “national” party, capable of orienting the foreign policy of the country in a pro-Russian direction. The Italian Communist Party prefers to break its alliance with the Socialist Party rather than break with Bonomi, and it is the only workers’ party in Italy which supports the regency of Prince Humbert.

In Spain, the Communist Party appears as the inspirer of the “National Union” movement which repeats under particularly odious conditions the policy of “the outstretched hand” with respect to Catholics, Monarchists, and other reactionary or confused elements who supported Franco during and after the civil war.

In Belgium and in Greece the Communist parties found themselves compelled to temporarily turn against the governments of Pierlot and Papandreou on the one hand because of the strong pressure of the masses who threatened to break out of bounds and on the other hand in order to counteract the American and British plans to dominate these countries. But while the insurrection of the popular masses, particularly in Greece, developed by its own internal logic and transformed itself into a revolutionary struggle against the entire national bourgeoisie and foreign imperialism, and clearly posed the question of power, the leadership of the Communist parties in Belgium and in Greece betrayed the unfolding revolution by orienting themselves towards a compromise on the basis of a new governmental combination with the bourgeois parties, supported by foreign imperialism. However, the Greek experience has demonstrated that despite their general line of betrayal, the Communist parties still possess deep roots in the masses, and that the capital of confidence they have acquired for themselves by exploiting the prestige of the October Revolution and the USSR and thanks also to the courageous conduct of their members and of their lower cadres, is still far from exhausted.

The Greek experience at the same time demonstrates that the attitude of the Communist parties, in a revolutionary situation characterized by the general uprising of the masses and their will to struggle, is not simply a function of the foreign policy of the USSR. The pressure of the masses makes itself felt in the attitude of both the members and lower cadres of the Communist parties, bringing with it the threat of breaking the bureaucratic vise of the leadership, as well as impressing itself on the latter and obliging it to disguise its general line of betrayal in order to be able finally to dam up the centrifugal forces of the masses and of its own rank and file.

The Civil War

However, neither the energetic counterrevolutionary intervention of British and American imperialism nor the treacherous conduct of the Stalinist and reformist bureaucracies has succeeded in checking the maturing of the revolutionary situation in Europe.

As the theses of the European Conference in February 1944 have underscored, “the imperialist war is being transformed with inexorable necessity into civil war.”

One after another the European countries are being drawn into the revolutionary vortex. While the imperialist war continues to drag on, in the countries “liberated” either by the Red Army or by the Allied troops, civil war flares and spreads.

In a number of countries with an agricultural structure and with strong feudal survivals, such as Poland and Hungary, occupied by the Red Army, it is the acuteness of the agrarian question, aggravated by the consequences of the war and the harshness of Nazi occupation, which in the main pushes the masses into revolutionary action. In other countries, among them Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Belgium, it is above all economic ruin manifested in inflation, mass unemployment, shortage of foodstuffs, which is at the bottom of the revolutionary ferment. Throughout Europe, five years of imperialist war have completely disorganized economic life, exhausted material resources, ruined the system of circulation, brought on famine and misery.

An indescribable chaos reigns in al the “liberated” countries, without any prospect of amelioration in sight.

On the contrary, while British imperialism, itself considerably impoverished in this war, proves incapable of extending any material aid whatever to the countries it claims in its own sphere of influence (Belgium, Italy, Greece) and while American imperialism abstains from risking its capital and its commodities in a Europe caught up in wild inflation and jolted by the first assaults of the revolution, the revolutionary action of the masses undermines the last possibilities of the bourgeoisie to re-establish its economy shattered and ruined by the war.

The revolutionary character of the situation is determined today by the fact that the slightest demand of the masses against the high cost of living, against famine, against unemployment puts a question mark over the very foundations of capitalism and leads inescapably to a struggle against the regime in its entirety.

The months ahead will aggravate this already extremely tense situation.

Last year has seen the inter-imperialist antagonisms, as well as the antagonism between imperialism and the USSR, attain an extreme acuteness.

To the degree that the secondary imperialisms collapse, to the extent that the Russian, American and British armies penetrate more deeply into Europe, and the defeat of Germany appears inevitable and close, posing the question of the future disposition of Europe and of the world—to that extent the “victors” will find themselves obliged to reveal their real “war aims,” to specify their demands and directly consolidate their interests by diplomacy and force.

American imperialism, in order further to weaken British power and to assure its commodities and its capital free access everywhere, systematically opposes the British policy which seeks to create blocs tied exclusively to British imperial economy (Civil Aviation Conference in Chicago, declarations of Stettinius concerning British policy in Italy and Greece.)

On the other hand, differences with Russia over the settlement of German, Polish and Balkan questions, become more extensive to the degree that the Red Army penetrates into central and southern Europe, England seconded in this sphere by the United States, at. tempts to limit the scope of Russian successes by maintaining the London Polish government as an instrument of struggle against the complete seizure of Poland by Russia, by the maneuvers of King Peter against Tito in Yugoslavia, by the brutal subjugation of Greece to its yoke and above all by the opposition which it will openly manifest to Russian plans concerning the fate of Germany after the latter’s defeat.

As a result of the exacerbation of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the strengthened German resistance in the face of the perspective of partition and despoliation which the Allied imperialist bourgeoisie and the reactionary Stalinist bureaucracy offer the German people, the war drags on piling up material and financial ruin.

But even in the event of an early defeat of Germany, no immediate social amelioration can be envisaged in Europe. The defeat of Germany will liberate twelve million foreign workers who will augment the ranks of unemployed in Europe.

But above all it will automatically intensify the revolutionary struggle on the entire continent, by drawing into the struggle masses who still are, thanks to the treacherous action of the Communist and Socialist parties, subordinating the struggle for their own demands to the prosecution of the war.

Every measure of the bourgeoisie to check the rise of the cost of living, to lower prices, to dam up inflation, is doomed to certain defeat. No administrative measures can restore real value to money without the expansion of production and the re-establishment of international exchange. No administrative measures can wipe out the black market so long as industry is unable to supply the peasants with cheap and plentiful products. Finally, no administrative measures can revive in the workers their strength and will to work in order to expand production without at the same time furnishing them with generous nourishment, satisfactory wages, and a tolerable standard of living.

The Character of the Revolutionary Movement

The revolutionary upsurge is taking place in Europe within the general framework of the continuing imperialist war and of the occupation of different countries by Allied or German armies. It is this fact which still curbs the revolutionary energies of the masses, which acts to distort the true class character of the struggle, which disperses it and which conditions the relative defeats of the first waves of the revolution.

In Belgium, in Italy, in Greece, the masses have fought and are fighting in an atmosphere which is still generally unfavorable, under the domination of the imperialist war, in the presence of occupying armies and under the hostile pressure against every independent class movement, resulting from the policy of national unity practiced by the treacherous workers’ parties.

Alongside the working class and sometimes ahead of it, the revolutionary movement embraces large sections of the poor peasantry and of the urban petty bourgeoisie, ruined either by inflation or by deflationary measures. The revolutionary fermentation of the petty bourgeoisie is one of the principal factors of the political instability which now reigns in all European countries, aggravating the crisis of the bourgeoisie, accelerating and amplifying the self-movement of the working class.

However, if the proletariat proves incapable of finding a victorious and relatively rapid solution to the struggle against the bourgeoisie, then the mass of impatient petty-bourgeois elements will inevitably turn, as in the past, to reactionary and fascist solutions. Experience has already demonstrated both in the countries “liberated” by the Red Army as well as in those “liberated” by the Allied armies, that the ruined bourgeoisie which is incapable of granting the slightest concessions to the masses and which is directly threatened by their growing agitation, has first of all recourse to “strong” solutions, resorting to police and military dictatorships based on occupation troops and on national fascist elements previously utilized during the Nazi occupation in order to smash the movement of the masses.

An interim “democratic” era of a relatively prolonged duration up to the decisive triumph either of the socialist revolution or once again that of fascism, is proving to be impossible. “Democratic” maneuvers are not, however, excluded in those cases where the bourgeoisie is able, thanks to the active aid of foreign imperialism, to strengthen itself first of all by brutally repelling the first revolutionary assaults of the masses and is able to rebuild its own apparatus of coercion (army, police), of disarming and dissolving the autonomous organizations of the masses such as militias, partisan detachments, etc., that had been created during the Nazi occupation—and in this way regaining its self-assurance. In such situations if the bourgeoisie is once again faced with the threat of a new and violent revolutionary offensive of the masses, it is possible that the bourgeoisie may open up a certain arena for “democratic” maneuvers which it will employ.

But in no case will these possibilities transcend the framework of a factitious solution extremely limited in point of time.

Our perspective, and therefore the definition of our tasks in the immediate future, must be based not on exceptional circumstances which may permit certain countries to experience a “democratic” period under the threatening pressure of the masses and for a limited time, but on the general line of the bourgeoisie as it has been derived from recent experiences in all the European countries and particularly in the countries characterized by an objectively revolutionary situation. Basing ourselves on the experience in Belgium and especially in Greece, we must emphasize the danger of seeing certain countries, following the example of Hungary (Horthy regime) and Poland (Pilsudski) after the last war, enter directly, after the first defeat of the revolution, into a dictatorial regime from which they will emerge only thanks to the direct support of the European and world proletariat.

On the other hand, the aggressive and brutal interference of foreign imperialism, first and foremost of British and American imperialism in a number of European countries (Belgium, Holland, Italy, Greece) where they have not hesitated to employ the harshest method of violence and massacre applied in colonial countries, shows how conscious imperialism is of the danger which weighs on the capitalist regimes of the European countries and how determined it is to struggle with utmost energy to dam up the revolutionary tide before it breaks loose over the entire European continent and other parts of the world.

The European bourgeoisies—in face of the direct threat of the masses and despite the dangers to their economic and political independence implicit in the active intervention of foreign imperialisms—do not hesitate to appeal to the forces of English and American imperialism and to support themselves principally upon these forces in order in the meantime to rebuild their own police and military apparatus of coercion.

In a number of countries, the revolutionary crisis has as its apparent point of departure the conflict between the armed popular forces—which had been amalgamated in organizations of resistance against the Nazi occupation—and the bourgeois state determined to restore its authority over them. In reality, the conflict is between the popular masses who refuse to submit again to the old capitalist order, who aspire to a revolutionary solution, and the governmental gangs of the reactionary bourgeoisie supported by foreign imperialism.

Despite the prejudices, illusions, confusion and darkness which still obscure and trouble the consciousness of the masses, despite the fact that the Communist parties corrupted by the politics of class collaboration, devoid of any boldness, devoid of any program and any revolutionary perspective, have nevertheless been lifted by the masses to head their struggles—despite al this, recent events in Belgium and Greece constitute the first phase of the revolution which has actually begun in these countries. Through these struggles and the inevitable struggles of tomorrow the masses will throw off everything that is outlived and will acquire the necessary experience to carry their struggles to the necessary culmination: the seizure of power.

Our Tasks in the Present Stage

While Europe as a whole has entered a revolutionary period, the amplitude and rhythm of the revolutionary crisis varies from country to country. In a number of countries, including primarily France, Spain, Italy, history still grants us a limited time for our sections to step up their ideological and organizational preparations in anticipation of the great struggles ahead. In other countries, such as Belgium and Greece, our sections have already had occasion to confront the first wave of the unfolding revolution. But it is not a question of a unilateral evolution toward decisive revolutionary or reactionary solutions. Pauses of greater or lesser duration are inevitable because of the general situation in Europe.

With scarcely an exception, all the necessary historic conditions for the triumph of the socialist revolution in Europe are not only objectively mature but even in the process of rotting. Lacking only are genuine revolutionary parties in the principal countries of Europe.

Although we have a solid core of devoted revolutionists in every European country, it is an undeniable fact that no European section of the Fourth International has as yet succeeded in becoming an organization whose internal functioning and methods of work are worthy of a real Bolshevik party.

Although time is pressing and we must not neglect the tasks which impending events are going to impose on us, the most important task for every section is to pitilessly uproot every trace of petty-bourgeois organizational methods, every vestige of the discussion group epoch and to replace them with a truly Bolshevik organization and method or work.

Our sections must utilize the interval between the successive phases of the revolution in order to assimilate the experience acquired, to improve their positions, to prepare themselves better for the next phase. In general, all our European sections should consider the immediate period as an extremely compressed period for political and organizational preparation in anticipation of the infinitely more widespread and acute struggles in all Europe.

In every country, the Party of the Fourth International should do its utmost to arm its members politically, to strengthen its technical and material resources, to multiply its avenues of expression, primarily the legal papers, and to acquire some strong footholds in all the trade union and political organizations.

It is at the same time necessary, taking the real conditions in each country as the point of departure, to elaborate a detailed plan of action in which the fundamental slogans of the transitional program find a living and concrete expression.

The primary political questions which are posed in the present period in the different European countries and to which our program of action must correspond, are the following:

a) The economic ruin resulting from the war and the consequent unemployment, high cost of living, famine.

b) The political crisis of the bourgeoisie translated into the instability of the bourgeois governments.

c) The fate of the popular political and military formations which emerged from the resistance to the Nazi occupation, and the neo-fascist threats.

d) The aggressive interference of foreign imperialism.

e) The continuation of the imperialist war and the imperialist plans for “peace.”

The program of action of each of our European sections should revolve around these problems, anchoring them around conditions peculiar to each country and providing concrete solutions for them, with the following general considerations as a guide:

The restoration and expansion of economic life can only be the work of the working class which will through its organizations (factory committees, trade unions) elaborate a plan based on the needs of the civilian population and which will apply the plan under the control of its organizations.

The idea of the plan implies control of economy by the working class, as well as an adequate organization of the latter and of the popular masses.

In every “liberated” country, the bourgeoisie has shown itself incapable of revitalizing economic life and improving the lot of the masses of the people. In some countries the political crisis of the bourgeoisie is manifested by governmental instability.

In view of this general situation which at bottom reflects the social crisis of the capitalist regime, our European sections will advance the slogan of the Workers’ Government or Workers’ and Peasants’ Government, (corresponding to the character of the country). But this slogan, perfectly correct at the present time, will find no echo whatever among the masses, if it is not adjusted to the conditions peculiar to each country. The Workers’ Government does not immediately signify the dictatorship of the proletariat, which can be realized in each country only by the Bolshevik party basing itself on workers’ and peasants’ Soviets, but a government of parties which claim to be workers’ parties, which for the moment have the confidence of the masses and which declare themselves prepared to realize a minimum program of anti-capitalist measures. Such are the Communist and Socialist parties today. Therefore the significance of the slogan of the Workers’ Government issued by our sections is nothing else but the following: We say to the workers’ parties, “Break the reactionary coalition with the bourgeois parties, take power and put your program into effect.”

On every occasion the leadership of our national sections should seize upon every aggravation of the political crisis to put forward this slogan concretely.

Such a government should base itself on the organizations of the working class and the toiling masses in general, on the militias, the factory committees, the housewives’ committees, the trade unions. But here, too, our sections must be capable of discerning in already existing organizations— such as the patriotic militias, the French FFI, the Greek partisans, etc.—despite their names and their reactionary orientation, their progressive social content, supporting them, orienting them and extending them.

The fierce attacks of the bourgeoisie and of foreign imperialism upon the popular militias and armed formations of partisans which emerged from the resistance to Nazi occupation demonstrate that the criteria of our class enemy were more correct than the political intuition of the ultra-leftists outside and inside our ranks as far as these formations are concerned.

Instead of ignoring them or condemning them en bloc, the followers of the Fourth International must attempt to develop their progressive social content and orient them toward an independent political existence in the service of the toiling masses and against the bourgeoisie.

The active interference of foreign imperialism and in the first place of British imperialism in Belgium, Italy and Greece, on the one hand sharply poses the need of intense propaganda for fraternization with the soldiers of the occupying armies and on the other hand, the intensification of the struggle against British imperialism by our British sections.

The European Executive Committee calls upon all interested European sections to issue as soon as possible material in the English language addressed to the soldiers and to use every means of strengthening the tendency of fraternization with the toiling masses of the occupied countries, the German masses and soldiers.

Finally, it is necessary to take into consideration the fact that the war is continuing and that heavier sacrifices than ever before will be imposed on the masses.

The sections of the Fourth International must struggle with all their might against the currents of national unity, and seize every opportunity to demonstrate to the masses that the imperialists are incapable of bringing the war to a rapid conclusion and of consolidating a democratic and lasting peace.

The war can end and the peace can be real in character only through the coordinated action of the toilers of all countries in overthrowing capitalism and establishing in its place the Socialist United States of Europe and of the world. The sections of the Fourth International must mercilessly denounce the monstrous plans of plunder and rape envisaged for the vanquished countries, especially Germany, and elaborated by the diplomats of the “Allied” imperialist bourgeoisie and the Stalinist bureaucracy. The EEC emphasizes the urgent necessity for all sections to abandon propaganda which is pure theoretically but which remains abstract and incomprehensible to the masses, and to immediately elaborate a plan of action, keeping in mind the real situation in every country and securing themselves every single lever capable of setting the masses in motion and accelerating their revolutionary maturity.

An unprecedented revolutionary situation is unfolding throughout Europe.

On our political and organizational abilities depends the task of becoming, in the grandiose events of this period, a real political force which can definitely lead the masses toward the conquest of power.

January 1945.

The European Executive Committee of the Fourth International.

From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin-Scenes From The Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night-The Ghost Dance-Late 1969

Scene Nine: Scenes From Search For The Blue-Pink Great American West Night- The Ghost Dance-Late 1969

Damn, already I missed Angelica, road-worthy, road-travel easy, easy on the eyes and easy getting us a ride Angelica as I traveled down Interstate 80 onto the great prairie Mid-American hitchhike road after we parted at the Omaha bus station, she heading home East, at least Indiana east from Nebraska, and I to the savage search for the blue-pink great American West night. And I will tell you true that first ride and every ride after that, every miserable truck stopped or sedan ride, it didn’t matter, made me utter that same missed Angelica oath.

Right then though I was on my first connection ride out of Omaha and as luck would have it this big bruiser, full tattoo armed with snakes, roses and lost loves names, truck driver who was obviously benny-ed, benny-ed to perdition and was talking a blue streak was driving right through to Denver, my next destination. All I wanted was the ride but I knew enough of the road, enough of the truck driver come-on part of it anyway to know that this guy’s blue streak was a small price to pay for such a lucky break.

See, some guys, some guys like Denver Slim, who left me off at that long ago (or it seemed like long ago) Steubenville truck stop and Angelica (hey, now I know who to blame for my miseries, if I ever get my hands on that damn Denver Slim… Yah, yah, what are you going to do, big boy?), wanted to talk man to man. Back and forth like real people, especially as I reminded him of his errant (read: hair growing long , full-bearded hippie –swaying) son. Other guys are happy for the company so they can, at seventy or seventy-five miles an hour with the engine revved high and where conversation is made almost painful and chock-filled with the “what did you says?”, spout forth on their homespun philosophy and take on this wicked old world. With these guys an occasional “Yah, that’s right,” or a timely “What did you mean by that?” will stand you in good stead and you can nod out into your own thoughts.

And that is exactly where I wanted be, as old Buck (where do they get these names out in Mid-America anyway) droned on and on about how the government was doing, or not doing this or that for, or to, the little guy who helped build up, not tear down, the country like him. Thinking about what Aunt Betty, sweet Neola, Iowa grandmotherly Aunt Betty, said as she left me off at the Interstate 80 entrance still rings in my ears. I was good for Angelica. Hell, I know I was. Hell, if I had any sense I would admit what I know inside. Angelica was good for me too. But see certain times were funny that way. No way in 1962, or ‘64, or ’66, let’s say, that I would have run into an Angelica. I was strung out, strung out hard on neurotic, long black-haired (although that was optional), kind of skinny (not thin, not slender, skinny, wistfully skinny, I say), bookish, Harvard Square, maybe a poet, kind of girls. If I said beatnik girls, and not free-form, ethereral, butterfly breeze “hippie” girls you’d know what I mean.

As a kid I was cranked on pale, hell wan was more like it, dark-haired, hard Irish Catholic girls, and I mean hard Irish Catholic girls with twelve novena books in their hands, and unrequited lust in their hearts. So, I swear, when Angelica’s number turned up I was clueless how to take just a plain-spoken, says what she means, means what she says young woman who had dreams (unformed, mainly, but dreams nevertheless) that also were plain-spoken. Ah, I can’t explain it now, and I doubt I ever will. Just say I was stunted, stunned, and smitten, okay and let me listen to old Buck’s drone.

Later.

I have now put many a mile between me and Omaha and here I am well clear of that prairie fire dream now in sweet winter desert night Arizona not far from some old now run down, crumbling Native American dwellings that keep drawing my attention and I still want to utter that oath, that Angelica oath. Sitting by this night camp fire casting its weird ghost night-like shadows just makes it worst. And old now well-traveled soldiers turned “hippies”, Jack and Mattie, playing their new-found (at least to me) flute and penny whistle music mantra to set the tone.

Hey, I just remembered, sitting here wrapped up in Angelica and ancient primal tribal memories out of the whistling black star-filled night that I haven’t filled you in on where I have been, who I have seen (like John and Mattie), and how I got here from that star-crossed Neola night, at least the past Denver part. Jesus, and here we are only a few hundred miles from the ocean. I can almost smell, smell that algae sea- churned smell, and almost see the foam-flecked waves turn against the jagged-edged La Jolla rocks and mad, aging surfer boys from another time looking for that perfect wave. Yah, another more innocent time before all hell broke loose on us in America and crushed our innocent youthful dreams in the rice paddies of Asia, our Angelica plain-spoken dreams, but not our capacity to dream. That only makes the Angelica hurt worst as I remember that she had never seen the ocean, the jagged edged, foam-flecked ocean that I went on and on about. I was to be her Neptune on that voyage west to the rim of the world. Well let me get to it, the filling you in part..

After grabbing that straight ride from blue streak talkin’ old Buck I did tell you about, and a short but scary two day delay by a serious snow squall hurricane-wind tumult just before the Rocky Mountain foothills leading into Denver I got there in good order. If I didn’t tell you before, and now that I think about it I didn’t, I was to hook up with my now traveling companions, Jack and Mattie, there for the final trip west to the ocean and serious blue-pink visions. If you don’t remember Jack and Mattie, they are two guys that I picked up on the Massachusetts highways heading south in the days when I had a car in the early spring. We had some adventures going south, that I will tell you about another time, before I left them off in Washington, D.C. so they could head west from there. We agreed then to meet up in Denver later in the year where they expected to stay for a while. My last contact with them in late summer had them still there but when I arrived at the communal farm on the outskirts of Denver where they had been staying I was informed that they had gotten nervous about being stuck in the snow-bound Rockies and wanted to head south as fast as they could. They had left a Phoenix address for me to meet them at. I stayed at the commune for a few days to rest up, doing a little of this and that, mostly that, and then headed out myself on what turned to be an uneventful and mercifully short hitchhike road trip to Phoenix to connect with them.

And so here we are making that last push to the coast but not before we investigate these Native American lands that, as it turns out, we all had been interested in ever since our kid days watching cowboys and Indians on the old black and white 1950s small screen television. You know Lone Ranger, Hop-along Cassidy, Roy Rogers and their sidekicks’ fake, distorted, prettified Old West stuff. Stuff where the rich Native American traditions got short shrift.

Earlier today we had been over to Red Rock for an Intertribal celebration, a gathering of what was left of the great, ancient warrior nations that roamed freely here not all that long ago but who are now mere “cigar store” Indian characters to the public eye. The sounds, the whispering shrill canyon sounds and all the others, the sights, the colors radiant as they pulled out all the stops to bring back the old days when they ruled this West, the spirit, ah, the spirit of our own warrior shaman trances are still in our heads. I am still in some shamanic-induced trance from the healing dances, from warrior tom-tom dances, and from the primal scream-like sounds as they drove away the evil spirits that gathered around them (not hard enough to drive the marauding “white devil” who had broken their hearts, if not their spirits though). Not only that but we scored some peyote buttons (strictly for religious purposes, as you will see) and they have started to kick in along with the occasional hit from the old bong hash pipe (strictly for medicinal purposes).

So right now in this dark, abyss dark, darker than I ever saw the night sky in the East even though it is star-filled, million star-filled, in this spitting flame-roared campfire throwing shadow night along with tormented pipe-filled dreams of Angelica I am embedded with the ghosts of ten thousand past warrior- kings and their people. And if my ears don’t deceive me, and they don’t, beside Jack’s flute and Mattie’s penny whistle I hear, and hear plainly, the muted gathering war cries of ancient drums summoning paint-faced proud, bedecked warriors to avenge their not so ancient loses, and their sorrows as well.

And after more pipe-fillings that sound got louder, louder so that even Jack and Mattie seem transfixed and begin to play their own instruments louder and stronger to keep pace with the drums. Then, magically, magically it seemed anyway, I swear, I swear on anything holy or unholy, on some sodden forebear grave, on some unborn descendent that off the campfire- reflected red, red sandstone, grey, grey sandstone, beige (beige for lack of better color description), beige sandstone canyon echo walls I see the vague outlines of old proud, feather-bedecked, slash mark-painted Apache warriors beginning, slowly at first, to go into their ghost dance trance that I had heard got them revved up for a fight. Suddenly, we three, we three television-sotted Indian warriors got up and started, slowly at first so we are actually out of synch with the wall action to move to the rhythms of the ghosts. Ay ya, ay ya, ay ya, ay ya,…..until we speed up to catch the real pace. After what seems an eternity we are ready, ready as hell, to go seek revenge for those white man injustices.

But just as quickly the now flickering camp fire flame goes out, or goes to ember, the shadow ghost dance warriors are gone and we crumble in exhaustion to the ground. So much for vengeance. We, after regaining some strength, all decide that we had better push on, push on hard, to the ocean. These ancient desert nights, sweet winter desert nights or not, will do us in otherwise. But just for a moment, just for a weak modern moment we, or at least I knew, what it was like for those ancient warriors to seek their own blue-pink great American West night.